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Posts Tagged ‘celebrity endorsement’

Send it to Mrs. Obama

18 Apr

In a lighthearted, but definitely interesting, piece published by the ‘Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2010,’ David Yermack has collected data to show that the brands that Michelle Obama wears in her public appearances tend to gain higher values in stock markets. Let me repeat this, whenever Mrs. Obama wears a brand in a public appearance, the brand she wore would start scoring returns that cannot be attributed to normal market variations!

On average, the brands she wears generate a value of about $14 million per appearance. And as a total of 189 public appearances, 29 brands scored about $2.7 billion in stock market value. And if you are a lady and reading this, you might be interested to know that in those 189 appearances, she wore about 245 items of apparel; so do you still think your closet collection is fashionable? …  yeah, right!!!!

So why this post? It is to stress on the importance of celebrity endorsement in marketing, branding, and eventually generating value. Mrs. Obama is definitely a special case. For instance, she is not paid to wear what she does. This is giving her a credibility that is pretty hard to establish in any celebrity endorsement campaign. Mr. Yermack goes further and attribute this huge impact of Mrs. Obama on the fashion industry to three reasons: her personal and authentic interest in fashion, her position as the first lady, and the power of social internet and e-commerce that makes such effects almost instantaneous; you could watch what she is wearing live, and start ordering it online right away!!

Now, reflecting that on the Saudi market, and the whole Arab market if you would, our celebrity endorsement campaigns are dreadful, to say the least. For a lot of marketers in this part of the world, unfortunately, it is only about getting the celebrity using the product in front of a camera and … that’s all!!! So for us, the consumers, it is a lousy performer, hugely paid, trying to convince us that this is the best juice, shampoo, telecom network out there!!! There are no common traits that the brand and the celebrity share and try to communicate to the consumers. Now I am saying this just assuming that those ads are created based on a branding strategy!!

To get the right picture, just think of Nike and its famous tennis players sponsoring/celebrity endorsement campaigns, or even better, check out the “elegance is an attitude” campaign of Longines watches and the beautiful Indian actress Aishwarya.

Having said that, there is one campaign that I would exclude from the Arab misfortunate celebrity endorsement campaigns. That is the campaign of Coca Cola and, the Lebanese singer, Nancy Ajram. Although the most favorable drink in the world, Coca Cola is usually facing a hard time, or a tough competition, from Pepsi in the Middle East and in the GCC countries to be more specific. Having Nancy on board, Coca Cola definitely scored high returns in all; market share and loyalty (I hope I’m in possession of hard numbers to support this argument, but I, unfortunately, do not). So why Coca Cola and Nancy were successful? because they both communicated the same message, having fun (read my latest post!). They knew how to mix the attractiveness of Nancy, who some would attribute to her childish appeal and some would attribute it to her explosive femininity, with message of being happy while having a bottle or a can of Coke (see some examples below)

Now, to conclude this post, if it happens that you are into fashion designing, you may want to consider sending some of your designs to Mrs. Obama!

 
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Posted in Advertisement, Branding, Marketing

 

The Jeddah Anti-littering Campaign

19 Dec

I was sitting in my car, minding my own business, waiting for the traffic light to go green when I saw that smiling gentleman flying from car to car distributing plastic bags and saying somethings to the drivers. My turn came and I received the below shown plastic bag and the gentleman said something like ‘Throw it right or you will be fined SAR 150,’ in other words, he was threatening me!!!

This is all a part of the anti-littering campaign that is currently carried out by the city municipality. The campaign started few days ago and the posters are all over the place advertising the fine that the city is imposing on Jeddawies throwing trash wherever they want! To see a photo of the street ads, check out this post by Deadul, and notice how she described them as ugly and creativity lacking, so now I am sure that I am not the only one who thinks this campaign is … read on …

So the campaign is built around the fines the city is imposing on people throwing trash around, in other words, the campaign is more advertising the fine rather than the cause itself. And in my opinion, this approach won’t work and won’t give the desired results!

Let me tell you why, usually the targeted audience of such campaigns are the youth sector between 20 and 35 or 40. And using the authoritative and/or threatening approach with such young audience won’t usually resonate with them, let alone the probability of leading them to the total opposite behavior.

If you remember, this same approach was also used by Saher, the traffic monitoring and ticketing system. Now, you cannot help but wonder why our government bodies are so convinced that Saudis won’t commit to such social causes unless threatened to subjected to punishments. I would bet my largest amount of money on the marketing agencies developing those poor campaigns.

Moreover, it is important to notice that even if we decided to let go the authoritative and threatening approach and adopted the softer one of appealing to people and nicely asking them to throw trash into cans and so forth, the campaign message won’t work as well!

So what should we do? many studies under the topic of social causes marketing suggest that for a campaign to be successful, it is better to be emotionalized. It should relate to the audience feelings, to trigger their shared responsibility, and to make them aware of the impacts and consequences of their decisions whether to adhere to the campaign message or not! Many techniques can be used to achieve this target, humanizing the face of the message is one, calling for the sense of the group/community or national pride is another, officials engagement to promote the message, or eliciting peer pressure (e.g. honoring those adhering to the message) are all possible ways of delivering an emotional social message.

To get things clearer, please allow me to close with an example that some would consider as the best anti-littering campaign ever made; it is the campaign branded as ‘Don’t mess with Texas.’ Back in the 80’s, the state of texas started to realize that it has a real problem of littering, especially on its highways, that was costing the city a lot of money to clean and look after to. The city went through the usual, they nicely asked the people to use trash cans, it did not work. They moved to threatening, it did not work neither. Then, they realized that they need to engage audience.  They humanized the message and used many celebrities in their campaigns. Within few months, it has been reported that littering has been reduced in Texas by about 72% …

Now … that’s what I call a successful campaign.

 
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Posted in Advertisement, Communication, Culture, Saudi business

 

How much does your smile worth?

05 Dec

So you must know how to smile, right? You should’ve tried it once or twice before :) Now think about this for a moment, how much does your smile worth? Humor me for a second and give it a price and think who might buy that smile from you?

Is that you wondering, who is buying smiles anyway? my friend … you are not looking hard enough!!

Just to give you a base for comparison, I would tell you how much the smile of Julia Roberts worth. You know whom I am talking about, right?!; you know, the pretty woman, literally! Julia Roberts is the woman of the irresistible charm. Yes; we might argue about her physical beauty, but it is very hard to dismiss her overwhelming attractiveness. Back to the subject; Julia Roberts smile worth $1.6 million (that’s about SAR 6 million)!!

The Italian coffee house ‘Lavazza’ bought that smile in a recent ad that will last for about 45 seconds. The actress was just asked to stand up there, show her killer smile by the end of the ad, and that’s all!!

It is another classical celebrity endorsement marketing deal, but for this one in particular, I would say it is a money-well-spent! Julia Roberts is a first class celebrity that would attract many audience. The fuss surrounding the ad and the money the actress received made the brand already known and on a worldwide scale before even the ad is scheduled to air over the christmas holiday. I would not dismiss the suggestion that behind this whole fuss, there is a smart marketing campaign!

So … again … how much does your smile worth? Just to make you feel good … and maybe special … I would say that your smile must be priceless ;)

 
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Posted in Advertisement, Branding, Marketing

 

No One to Vaccinate

21 Dec

On the 26th of last October, while talking about H1N1, its vaccination rumors, and how our ministry of health (MoH) was handling the subject, I posted the following concern:

‘Just imaging the situation when the vaccine becomes available and nobody is there to take it!’

You do not have to imagine anymore because it is a fact by now; there is nobody taking the vaccine. According to Arab News (in English) and Al Watan (in Arabic), the vaccination campaign against H1N1 that started last Saturday is recording nothing but huge failure. In Jeddah, 300 students out of 300,000 accepted to be vaccinated. And for those of you with good mathematical skills, you’ve already figured out that the percentage is only 0.1%. Honestly, I did not see that coming; it is a really horrible percentage.

Think about it this way; imagine that you have had endured huge expenses to bring some kind of a product to the market but reality decided to slap you on the face saying ‘guess what? Customers do not want your product.’ Yes, the analogy isn’t that accurate; but the concept is still the same.

It is fair to say that MoH officials are trying, but it seems that they are not trying hard enough. All the signs of failure have been there since the beginning but they chose to ignore them.

They certainly need more work now than before. Number of solutions that they might follow could be:

  • Be Transparent: in my opinion, this is the most critical part of all. People are worried because they feel that MoH officials are not transparent enough. No one of them is directly addressing rumors and scientifically going through the controversies they are creating.  Be open about the possible consequences of vaccination, if there is any!
  • Understand your Customers: what are their fears? Why they do not want their children to be vaccinated? Are they willing to have it themselves?
  • Reach your Customers: Go to schools, hospitals, or invite selected individuals who could influence others (e.g. Mosque Immams, company owners, TV or Radio hosts, University professors, etc …) and talk to them about how safe the vaccine is.
  • Launch an Endorsement Campaign: engage with a celebrity or a prominent society figure to speak to the public about the safety of the vaccination process.

Let’s wait and see how things will turn out to be!!

 
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Posted in Advertisement, Public Relations